8 thoughts on “Canadian Price Variants: Noteworthy Sales”

Hi everyone, an ASM #238 variant in CGC 9.2 sold yesterday on eBay as a “Best offer accepted” listing — with this type of sale, instead of showing the actual sale price itself in the sold listings section, eBay shows the original asking price slashed through with a line and the words “best offer accepted” underneath. I.e. they do not directly reveal the actual accepted price. There are some services out there you can pay for to learn sales prices like these.

But there’s also a free way to “tease out” the likely accepted price within a very small margin of error and I wanted to use this opportunity to walk through how to do that for anyone who might not already be familiar with the technique:

The first step is to come up with a search term that will give us a huge number of recent sales (you’ll see why we want a huge number of recent sales in a moment) — what I like to do is search on just the grade in question, i.e in this case I’d search eBay on the term “CGC 9.2”:

Then along the left-hand column of the page, select to see Sold Items only:

Next, near the top right of the resulting page, use the feature to sort the results ordered by highest price + shipping:

Note that this will now sort each of the results in the order of the highest total sale price with shipping to your zip code — and so using this technique we won’t see the total sale price with shipping to the buyer’s zip code (or the buyer’s country if outside the US) for each listing, and that makes this technique imperfect but still pretty close.

Now, all we need to do is find the listing in question among the results — in this case we’re looking the ASM #238 variant which I found quickly by doing a find-in-page (control-F on a PC) on the word “Canadian” where I found the listing on page 1 of the sorted results — and we also need to find two “anchor” listings above and below it where the sale price is exact (i.e. as either a buy-it-now or an auction result).

Using those two known sale price anchors, we in turn know that the accepted offer is between the two, due to how eBay has sorted the results from highest to lowest with shipping (and again, we’ll have a margin of error within the shipping price variation because eBay is sorting based on the shipping cost to your zip code not the actual shipping cost paid by the buyer of each of the shown listings).

Here below is a screenshot of the ASM #238 listing we were looking for with two known price anchors above and below:

Based on the above, the total with shipping for the top anchor is $776.58, while the total with shipping for the bottom anchor is $770 — thus the total with shipping for the ASM 238 (again to our zip code which may differ from what the actual buyer paid whose location is unknown) should fall in between those two.

With best-offer listings the buyer and seller usually agree on a “round number” so I’d guess that number in this case would be an even $775 shipped — or $750 plus $25 shipping (which once again is the cost to my zip code and may not be what the buyer paid in shipping depending on their shipping distance from the seller). Thus with the above technique we are able to “tease out” the likely range of accepted price to a narrow margin for this ASM #238 variant and this same technique can be used for investigating any best-offer sale.

Hey guys. Love the site and thrilled with the 2019 version of the guide. I know raws are a bit harder to track and trust the advertised grade, but here are some significant variant sales I’ve had recently. (Prices in Canadian dollars.)

I had a nice little compilation image done up, but couldn’t figure out how to load it. But here they are:

Hi everyone, a reader wrote in by email to Doug to share two recent variant sales of theirs on eBay from “EH”BCDevo’s Comics; they also noted that both items sold within 6 hours of being listed. The two sales were the Marvel Movie Showcase #1 variant in CGC 7.5 for C $299.99 ($226.53 US), and the Tales of the Teen Titans #44 variant in CGC 9.2 for C $149.99 ($109.45 US). Below is an eBay screenshot of these two sales (note that the prices in the screenshot are currency-adjusted to USD as of the moment I took the screenshot so that’s why they show a few cents different from the reported USD conversion amounts at the time of the sale).

While over on eBay, I also noticed a few other noteworthy variant sales that have taken place recently: